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Byron W. Lacy

Genres

Fiction & Literature

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Byron W. Lacy

Byron W. Lacy was born in Burnet, Texas on March 21, 1950. He is a fourth generation Texan. Byron’s Great Grandfather, George W. Lacy, came to Texas in the early 1850’s. George and two of his business partners donated the granite to build the current Texas state capitol. He also started a dog breed which is now called the Blue Lacy and is the state dog of Texas. Byron incorporates stories of his ancestors in his books.Byron started writing poetry while in high school and received great encouragement from his
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teachers. His first poem was published in a small literary magazine before he turned twenty one. Byron has had many poems published in literary magazines. In 1976 Byron received a B.S in English. In 1977 he received a M.A. in Graphic art and in 1988 a M.F.A. in Graphic Art. Byron has had paintings and sculptures exhibited in galleries and Museums throughout the United States.Byron has worked as a Summer Camp Director, Short Order Cook, Carpenter, Plumber, Electrician, English and Art teacher, Freelance Artist, Eligibility Specialist for Texas Department of Human Services, and Investigator of child abuse allegations for Texas Child Protective Services. Byron now lives in Nacogdoches, Texas where he spends his time writing, creating sculptures and paintings, studying psychology, metaphysics, alien abductions, and working on his home.

Lacy’s (The Night is a Constant Lover, 2012) first foray into fiction is a sci-fi soap opera with cosmic time travel, a malevolent astrophysics professor and aliens monitoring everything.

A man travels from Germany to the U.S. with his daughter, whom he’s impregnated. The young girl adopts the last name Alaska, and down the lineage is born Travis T., a twelve-fingeredphysicist who creates a time machine. Enter power-hungry Dr. Angstrom, who works at perfecting time travel, in part so he can send men into the past to kill Travis’ grandparents, allowing the professor to take credit for Travis’creation. Lacy’s novel is ambitious in design, following the Alaska clan’s origins in great detail, and it involves a vast number of people: Ruby Gold, a spiritual being hoping to be incarnated; aliens, or “grays,” who watch and occasionally abduct Alaska family members; and Cotton, who acts as narrator, searching for a vampire that killed his parents. The abundance of characters doesn’t allow much time for development—the titular character appears only sporadically—and some of the significant players either have no personalities, such as time-traveling hit man Joseph Lullaby, or are simply mentioned in passing, like Travis’ rather eccentric parents. Though the book’s title sounds decisively YA, the material is anything but; it delves into rape, incest, inbreeding and murder. Nonetheless, Cotton is telling this story to children at a diner. Provocative content notwithstanding, Lacy drops in bits of well-timed humor—Travis dates two women named Kathy and notes a tendency to bungle their names—and manages to incorporate time travel into the plot in sensational ways, as when a character uses it to stop a suicide or two people travel in time during a scuffle. Though nonlinear, the plot maintains momentum by avoiding repetition and steadily progressing regardless of when it’s set in time, and even the occasional change to a first-person perspective remains clearsighted.

A time-traveling story that entertains with madcap characters and wildly capricious plotlines.

ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE:

THE NIGHT IS A CONSTANT LOVER

Poetry

The Night is a Constant Lover is a very personal book in which the author has not been afraid to reveal the hopes, wants, needs, and desires of his own soul. Though autobiographical the book touches upon universal truths common to every heart. It is the kind of book where you will hear yourself speaking just like in pop songs.
It seems that some of us, as children, were too impressionable and when we were introduced to stories like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, by the brothers Grimm, and Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault, as well as countless other fairy tales, they set us on a course of searching for our own "happily ever after". These poems chart the course of such a quest.
They take the longings that we all experience and put them into words for us so that we might better understand our own emotions. This volume of poems touches our soul when it talks of the loneliness that drives us to search for love, the exhilaration we experience when at last we find that one special someone, and the pain and longing that return when love walks away.
It also promises the hope of love returning like the morning sun. The Night is a Constant Lover is an honest and moving autobiography of a hungry heart.
Byron has been inspired by the writings of E.E. Cummings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Rod McKuen, and Walt Whitman.

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